WotC Strixhaven sounds like it'd be a nice mini-setting for D&D

[Parmandur]

I've been having trouble parsing it. Artifacts aren't played on your opponent, so why would I want to destroy myself?

So, let's say you play this card on turn 3, it's in your field of play, and you have a couple of weak Creatures but I'm still Mana ramping and have nobody in the field. You attack with your two creatures, two counters go on the artifact. If I have a creature hit you, it takes one off. If it gets to ten counters, and I still have 11 life, or whatever, I still lose.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

So, to answer this question, this is a potentially pretty good ticking time bomb card:

I've been having trouble parsing it. Artifacts aren't played on your opponent, so why would I want to destroy myself?

What I believe it represents is if the owner of the arena "wins" enough individual bouts they win the game. The somewhat convoluted wording is because you can sometimes have more than two players in an MtG game. So instead of saying "you win" is says "the last player hit loses and the arena resets".

 

[bedir than]

What I believe it represents is if the owner of the arena "wins" enough individual bouts they win the game. The somewhat convoluted wording is because you can sometimes have more than two players in an MtG game. So instead of saying "you win" is says "the last player hit loses and the arena resets".

I have a feeling that since I'm a sports nerd I will see how it resolves in MtG Arena because yes, I will have a deck dedicated to fake sports

 

[Parmandur]

What I believe it represents is if the owner of the arena "wins" enough individual bouts they win the game. The somewhat convoluted wording is because you can sometimes have more than two players in an MtG game. So instead of saying "you win" is says "the last player hit loses and the arena resets".

Yes, having ng read some commentary on that, the wording is related to multiplayer formats.

 

[Parmandur]

I have a feeling that since I'm a sports nerd I will see how it resolves in MtG Arena because yes, I will have a deck dedicated to fake sports

So, in a head to head game, by definition the last player damaged when the final token is placed will be the Stadium holder's opponent. In Commander format, that's another story.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm not an MtG expert, but I'm pretty sure there are ways to steel people's artefacts, tokens and all...

 

[Parmandur]

I'm not an MtG expert, but I'm pretty sure there are ways to steel people's artefacts, tokens and all...

Indeed, it is one of the oldest tricks in the book...and the sort of thing more likely to show up in Commander, due to the card pool.

 

[Dire Bare]

Although nothing you've written here is actually untrue, and you craft a fair argument, I do have a couple of counterpoints...

The first being, we have very little info on the Strixhaven dragons. My interpretation of them so far is that as Elder Dragons, they behave less like D&D dragons and more like dragons such as Niv-Mezzet; being powerful loremasters and sages, practically gods. This matches how they seem to be stands in for Harry Potter's Hogwartz founders (Gryffinder, Slytherin), and are more focused around a school of magic instead of anything particularly dragon-focused. The images so far from Strixhaven don't seem to have anything particularly dragon themed.

As for the new fey-races not having a history in D&D... they do!

Faeries have appeared many times in D&D, the owlfolk seem to be a callback to the Feywild-dwlling owl-like Hsaio, and the kingdom of goblins in the feywild references how goblins may originate there. Rabbitfolk is the one entirely new thing.

I'll admit a lot of the above is pulling from older editions, and will likely be doing some retconning to fit it all in 5E, but all in all these races do seem to meld pretty well with D&D's Feywild.

Even the rabbit-folk aren't completely new to D&D. In the same supplement that gave us the hsaio (giant, intelligent owls), we got the pooka, fey shape-changers. Pooka, like rakshasa, aren't limited to a single animal form (tigers for rakshasa), but all of the illustrations and examples were of rabbit-pooka.

 

[Dire Bare]

I'm not sure why Prismari students carry urine samples around in their bags. Not looking forward to whatever new spell that's a component for.

It's for the spell, pass drug-test without a trace.

 

[Undrave]

These schools feel like more interesting Wizards subclass than the schools we DO have >.>